SimCoaster

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Get out your barf bags... again. It's time to return to Sim Theme Park.

By IGN Staff

So you couldn't sell your own umbrellas, and so the physics weren't picture perfect. So what? Sim Theme Park (known as Theme Park World in Europe) delivered the gallon of brain injection fuel that was sorely lacking in games like the original Theme Park and Roller Coaster Tycoon -- the chance to ride your creations in full 3D. All of them. You could build your coaster with an easy interface, and jump in it in seconds. You could ride the kiddy rides... hell, you could even walk around the park looking for a cheap liter of soda. While Roller Coaster Tycoon can't be beat for detail, Sim Theme Park gave you a similar, but ultimately unique experience that had fans of the Sim genre smiling. So it is any surprise that EA and Bullfrog have announced a sequel? Or that the sequel's name has been changed to SimCoaster? Forget about franchise singularity, we're talking about profits here.

The good thing about SimCoaster is that while the name has changed, the core gameplay has not. The art style is still in that classic cartoony Bullfrog style, and rides, plants and buildings pop out of the ground with the same fluid animation. For fans of the original, all the nice touches that charmed you in the original are still there. What has been tweaked, however, is the structure of the game, as well as the focus. The open-ended structure has been replaced with... goals! Which is very similar to open-endedness, only if you added a brick wall with a big yellow and gold door at the end. This time around, you play a member of the corporate ladder who's been given the opportunity to run the Theme Park business... that is, if you can get your act together. While you'll always have time to build the latest and greatest park, this time around, if you can build the best, cleanest, most profitable parks, you'll also get extra shares in the company, unlock areas, as well as special rides and prizes.

The game focuses on three different environments this time around instead of the original four for the first title -- instead of fantasy themes, this time they've gone for a little more realism with environment-based parks. An inventor's realm features cogs, gears, and wooden structures straight out of Jules Verne. Polar Zone features icy landscapes and frosty rides, while Arabian Nights mixes desert themes and magical myths for some fun in the sun. Each environment features 18 objectives for a total of 15 levels, as well as ten challenges for each area that should be familiar to the gold ticket challenges in the original game.

Objectives and challenges are really what make SimCoaster tick this time around, and a lot of time has been spent giving you firm goals so that you're constantly working towards the end -- having a controlling number of stocks in the company. While you'll be able to jump in and create a perfect park for fun, like in the original, if you want to unlock the other parks, the special rides, or more space to spread out in, you'll have to do special tasks in each area, such as researching how to drain a lake, then training a set of staff to do the task -- giving you access to a set of pond-traveling boats. Some junk and trash block an entire section of another park, and you'll have to commit to some research and labor in order to gain access to more building room. While the early objectives are fairly simple, later objectives become more complex and challenging, like the profit maximization objective that has you trying to grow a certain amount by a certain time, with a general set standard of excellence needed.

Your challenges are smaller in scope, and will give you more money, more stocks, and those golden tickets you'll need if you want to gain the ability to build special rides. Unlike Sim Theme Park, which sprung special goals on you with no time to prepare, you can check out challenges in a special menu this time around, and attempt them when you feel your ready. For the team, it was a matter of focus -- the original challenges were added almost as an afterthought, while this time around they've become a core part of the game, and it feels like it. Sample objective including getting rid of a certain amount of hot dogs in a month (and no, you can't just dump them in the nearest landfill), keep a specific ride at a specific level of upkeep, stop vandals from doing any pranks in the park for a set number of months, and so on. You'll still have a limit to the amount of times you can fail, however. Lose five different challenges, and you fail the game. No one said running a park was easy, just as no one said that getting the right ratio of cancer causing dye to sugar in the cotton candy machine was simple.

What would a game like this be without the coasters, though? Like the original, you'll have access to log flumes, suspended coasters, bobsled coasters and the like, 18 in all. While the physics are light compared to Roller Coaster Tycoon, what you'll get is the ability to put together a good coaster for your park in a matter of minutes instead of hours, made easier by the fact that now you can pop in loops and corkscrews with a press of the button. This is instant gratification at its finest, and like the original, you can ride each and every creation. There are more pre-made rides than ever, each with the same wacky, original design of the original, but with a new addition, weather. Weather now affects rides, and some rides will obviously be more popular than others during certain months -- you might want to shut down certain rides during slow parts of the season, or lower the price to keep the ride making money. It's just one of the ways that the team is trying to make the game a little more technical, while focusing on the fun.

The online component has been pared down in SimCoaster, with a focus on the ability to email rides, post rides on the site, and send postcards. While the team enjoys the multiplayer aspects of the original game, they wanted to focus on the single player game this time around, in order to make sure that SimCoaster was "a game, instead of a toy" according to the designers.

Other new features include a new staff type, the gardener, parent and grandparents instead of just children, and a coaster design kit where you can design a coaster on your own time, than import it into your own game as a pre-made coaster. And for those of you that felt the camera was a little too comfy for you, now you can pull out and a get a nice broad view of the park, perfect for designing large landscapes, or putting together that monster coaster to spread around the entire park. And for the more technical folks out there, now you can also use info kiosks to promote specific rides, and you can price individual rides as well. The list goes on and on and on... but I don't. While I'd like to give you each and every detail, that's for the spreadsheets and not so much for the lazy redheads on the editorial staff. Besides, I'm doing research for the review copy using a laundry basket and the stairwell, so I'm a bit busy. I'll let you know how it goes. All mail and cards can be sent to San Francisco Medical Hospital, c/o Vincent "Mtzlplck Sanchez Guido Tortilla" Lopez.